As part of our commitment to supporting young talent, Vectorworks and our Swiss distributor ComputerWorks AG sponsor the Foundation Award program in Switzerland. We are proud to announce that JOM Architects in Zurich, Switzerland has won this year’s award that supports young Swiss architecture firms. The firm is led by three agency partners, each with different backgrounds and focuses, who combine their design philosophies to demonstrate the productive potential of heterogeneous mindsets.

Vectorworks has teamed up with the Fundacío Mies van der Rohe to give architecture, urban planning, and landscape design students across Europe an opportunity to gain recognition for creating remarkable experiences. As an extension of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) is open to European higher education institutions, which must register and nominate their student’s best capstone projects from the 2015-2016 academic year by July 29, 2016 to qualify.

This past Sunday was the biggest night in theatre as the best and brightest on Broadway took to the stage at the Beacon Theatre in New York to celebrate the 2016 Tony Awards. Vectorworks Spotlight software users took home some of the top design awards of the night. We congratulate these talented designers and will continue to admire their work as they blaze new paths in the world of scenic and lighting design.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve brought home another major win from this year’s American Institute of Architecture (AIA) Convention, and not just because of all of the wonderful demos and conversations we had with the architects there. We’re talking about receiving our third consecutive “BEST of SHOW” award from Architosh. This year, Vectorworks Architect 2016 design software won the Desktop category.

Since 1965, the Henry Hewes Design Awards have recognized outstanding achievement in design for theatre on Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, celebrating the fields of scenic design, costume design, lighting design, and notable effects: a unique category that includes achievement in sound, music, video, and puppetry. We would like to congratulate the Vectorworks Spotlight users who are among the 66 nominated artists and four award winners from 49 productions that ran during the 2014-2015 season.

In its inaugural year, the Royal Institute of British Architects’ (RIBA) International Prize for Architecture recognizes the most significant building of the year that demonstrates visionary, innovative thinking and excellence of execution, while making a distinct contribution to its users and to its physical context. Unlike any previous RIBA award for architecture, the RIBA International Prize is open to any qualified architect in the world.

While the concepts students learn in the classroom are valuable, there’s no substitute for the real-world experience that design competitions provide. Competitions are great because they let emerging visionaries test their skills and interact with working professionals, and receiving a prize at the end doesn’t hurt, either.

Architectural students from the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) in the Dominican Republic, as well as the University of Tokyo and Tokyo University of Science in Japan, collaborated with Vectorworks users and industry experts from around the world during Build New York Live, a collaborative, virtual design competition held over 48 hours. Their team, BIM Unlimited, used non-standard geometry and BIM workflows to integrate structural analysis, MEP design, external windflow analysis, and 4D construction scheduling into a single global design. The resulting 60-story residential tower and multisport community outreach arena in Lower West Manhattan won the competition's “Best Use of BIM for Sustainability or Constructability Award.”

Team BIM Unlimited's submission to Build New York Live.

“The fact that we worked with a team of over 20 people from around the world to produce a project in a such an accelerated way was just amazing,” said Dominican students Ibsen García, Alfredo Cuello, and Ramdel Guerrero. “We ended up understanding how similar the workflows are in other countries compared to the Caribbean and what the demands are on other professionals in the architecture and construction field. We had no limits on the collaboration process since everyone was working in the cloud, which was really liberating. Everything just worked as it should, and we never had any issues.”

While the students in the Dominican focused on creating the building form's massing models, students from Japan used FlowDesigner software, which communicates with Vectorworks Architect via IFC file exchange, to run an airflow analysis, simulating the wind patterns over the site based on information from existing buildings and weather data. The team, comprised of students Prudsamon Kammasorn, Tatsuya Karube, Shuya Morita, Tomohiro Yamamoto, and Hideaki Yoshida under the leadership of doctoral student Yasin Mohamed Ibrahim, used windflow analysis to directly impact the building’s design. This impact includes the creation of the sports arena's distinctive, vertical-louvered façade, the setback core of the residential tower's ground floors, and the placement of trees in the landscape design, which reduced the wind velocity at the corner of the building facing the ocean.

After a company rebrand and the historic launch of Vectorworks 2016 design software with more than 100 updates this past September, it's hard to envision that Vectorworks 2016 could get any better. Alas it has – winning an American Package Design Award from Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) in the Electronics and Computers category this week!

We've done it again! For six years and counting, we’ve been honored by the Construction Computing Awards, an annual program that celebrates the technology, tools, and solutions that aid in the effective design, construction, maintenance, and modification of commercial buildings, residential and social housing, as well as civil engineering projects of all sizes.